Turkey’s PM holds pro-Erdogan rally in Germany

Participants wave Turkish flags while waiting for the Turkish Prime MInister for a campaigning event in Oberhausen, western Germany, on February 18, 2017. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim speaks to an expected crowd of some 10,000 people of Turkish origin in Germany to promote support for an April 16, 2017 constitutional referendum on expanding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s powers.<br />Sascha Schuermann / AFP

Turkey’s prime minister drew criticism Saturday for holding a rally in Germany urging Turks there to support a referendum that would expand President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s powers.

Binali Yildirim also told the several thousands of people at a stadium in Oberhausen, in western Germany, that Turkey would track down the participants in last July’s failed military coup “in all the holes where they are hiding”.

Germany is home to about three million people of Turkish origin, the legacy of a massive “guest worker” programme in the 1960s and 70s and the biggest population of Turks in the world outside of Turkey.

They will be able to vote in the April 16 referendum, which would discard the post of prime minister for the first time in Turkey’s history.

Critics say the new presidential system will cement one-man rule in the country.

Some 750 opponents of Erdogan rallied peacefully near the Oberhausen stadium, according to police.

Sevim Dagdelen, a lawmaker in Germany’s far-left Die Linke party, called the rally “a publicity campaign for a dictator”.

Another lawmaker, Cem Ozdemir of the Greens, wrote in the Kolner Stadt Anzeiger paper: “I find it shocking that a Turkish prime minister has no qualms about taking advantage of our democracy while he and his henchmen make their opponents disappear behind bars,” he said.

But Yildirim told the supporters of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) that “the era when some could give lessons to Turkey is over. Turkey is not a country that will be intimidated”.

The German daily Die Welt said Friday that Turkish police were holding its correspondent in the country.

Deniz Yucel, 43, has been detained in connection with reports on a hacker attack on the email account of Turkish Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, a son-in-law of Erdogan, the paper said.